-- “Just released video from a New York police helicopter reveals the horror of the terror attack on the World Trade Center as it happens. The 17-minute footage shows incredibly close footage of black smoke billowing from the towers in the biggest terror attack ever on US soil. "Holy shit," says one cop as the crew watches later as the first tower crumble to dust from a helicopter landing pad. The video was obtained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology under the Freedom of Information Act and was sent with several photos anonymously to the Cryptome website.”

-- "An African spurred tortoise (Geochelone sulcata) with two heads and five legs is displayed in Zilina, Slovakia. The seven-week-old two-headed tortoise has been given two names: Magda (left head) and Lenka (right head)."

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"Fossilized alien microbes have been discovered in a sample extracted from a meteorite, according to research carried out by a NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center astrobiologist. What's more, he has challenged any scientist to investigate his work.

Published in the online Journal of Cosmology, Richard Hoover's paper claims to have made the discovery after finding "large complex filaments" inside "freshly fractured internal surfaces" of carbonaceous chondrite meteorite samples (including new fragment samples from the famous French Orgueil meteorite).

Some of the "alien" fossils appear to resemble bacteria found on Earth (such as types of cyanobacteria, a microorganism that helped make early-Earth hospitable to life by producing oxygen), whereas others don't look so familiar.

"The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth," Hoover told Fox News in an "exclusive" interview.

"There are some that are just very strange and don't look like anything that I've been able to identify, and I've shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped."

This discovery could have huge implications for the genesis of life on Earth. If there are microbes that originated inside a meteorite that was found on Earth, did life originate from space? If so, did life on Earth get "seeded" by a meteorite? Perhaps Earth-Brand™ Life is actually an evolved form of Cosmic-Brand™ Life?..."

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"Whether Antarctica's ice will survive a warmer world is one of the great puzzles of climate science. Now it seems vast expanses of ice may have hung on for the past 200,000 years, surviving the last interglacial.

The west Antarctic ice sheet's base is below sea level, which should make it unstable. If it were to collapse the torrent of fresh water could raise global sea level by 5 metres. Whether or not this will happen as temperatures climb is a hotly debated topic.

A new study by David Sugden at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues suggests the ice sheet may be more stable than we thought. They studied the Heritage range of mountains near the central dome of the west Antarctic ice sheet. Specifically, the researchers looked at blue-ice moraines, where winds erode the ice in topological depressions, exposing the rocks beneath.

They analysed the moraine for beryllium isotopes produced by cosmic radiation, which accumulate in the rock when it is exposed. Sugden's team found evidence that the moraines had been forming for at least 200,000 years, suggesting that ice has covered the area for at least that long (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, DOI: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2011.01.027), and therefore survived the last interglacial 125,000 years ago.

Don't expect this to be the final word on the matter. A recent study by Robert Kopp at Princeton University (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08686) suggests sea levels were 8 to 9 metres higher than now during the last interglacial, in part due to the west Antarctic ice sheet melting. If Sugden's team is correct, that amount of sea level rise would be unlikely.

Working out who is right is a "frustrating and intriguing scientific riddle that we'd love to unravel", says Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Even if the central parts of the ice sheet can survive a warming climate, melting is likely at the extremities, says Sugden. Tim Naish of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, agrees. With melting at the edges and in Greenland, "we're looking at a rise of one metre plus or minus 0.5 metres" by 2100, he says - double the maximum predicted in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

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-- They see me rollin', they hatin'...

"A rocket carrying the Glory Earth-observing satellite launched yesterday but failed to place the satellite into orbit, sending both plummeting into the Pacific.

Nasa said a protective covering on the Taurus XL rocket did not separate as planned three minutes after launch at 2.09am local time (10.09 GMT).

With the covering intact, the rocket was too heavy to get the satellite into orbit.Nasa launch commentator George Dillar announced the failure 15 minutes after lift-off from Vandenberg Air Force base in California.

Launch director Omar Baez said: 'We failed to make orbit and all indications are that the satellite and rocket are in the South Pacific Ocean somewhere.'

The satellite and rocket were built by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, which suffered a similar failure with a Taurus XL rocket in 2009 on another Nasa launch.

After that failure, Orbital Sciences redesigned the system for shedding the protective covering.

Ron Grabe of Orbital Sciences said the company considered the problem to be fixed and had carried out three successful launches with the new system before yesterday's failure.

Orbital Sciences has been expected to be among the private companies that will be used to get cargo to the International Space Station once Nasa retires its shuttle fleet..."

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“Members of renegade Russian art group Voina showered Russian policewomen with passionate kisses in their latest stunt shown in a video released on Tuesday as a new police law came into effect. The short video shows a string of clips of young women approaching female police officers on duty and kissing them on the mouth.

The footage is shown to a fast-paced Yiddish song "Down With the Police" that dates from early 20th century. "Voina, in the face of activists of its militant-feminist wing, has initiated the rite of kissing cops and their cop abuse. They chose the grey women as the objects of carrying out the rite," a Voina statement said, as written on the blog wisegizmo.livejournal.com.

Russian police, including women officers, wear ill-fitting grey uniforms during winter months accompanied with grey traditional 'ushanka' hats. Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev initiated a new police law in an attempt to reform the force known for rampant corruption. Since the Bolshevik revolution, it has been called "militsia", but the reform rebrands it back to "politsia".

The Voina activists are shown in clips filmed mostly in the Moscow metro, where they approach officers with a question that is quickly followed by an aggressive kiss on the mouth. In one of the clips they nearly fall off the station platform as the officer tries to break free of the embrace. On its Twitter blog the group claimed to have kissed "several hundred" policewomen.”

-- Out of the many nutty activities that the creative offspring of great Mother Russia dream up, this is the one I could actually get into…

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-- "A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This sharp view of the gorgeous island universe shows off a striking yellow nucleus and galactic disk. Dust lanes, small, pink star-forming regions, and young blue star clusters are embedded in the patchy, tightly wound spiral arms. In contrast, many other spirals exhibit grand, sweeping arms with large star-forming regions. NGC 2841 has a diameter of over 150,000 light-years, even larger than our own Milky Way, but this close-up Hubble image spans about 34,000 light-years along the galaxy's inner region. X-ray images suggest that resulting winds and stellar explosions create plumes of hot gas extending into a halo around NGC 2841."

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“A colony-founding queen of the invasive species of fire ant that is believed to have spread to California, China and Australia from the southern U.S.

In the past century, imported red fire ants have traveled the world and established colonies in far-flung places like Australia and China, oceans away from their native range in South America. Now a genetic study has retraced their routes, pinpointing the southern United States as the likely source for these invasions.

The stinging ants, a fire ant species known as Solenopsis invicta, arrived in Mobile, Ala., from South America about 80 years ago before rapidly spreading throughout the South.

It's not clear exactly how they hitched a ride, since the ants require very little to survive a long time, said Kenneth Ross, an entomologist at the University of Georgia and one of the study’s researchers.

"They can survive for long periods under very unnatural circumstances," Ross told LiveScience. Their only requirements are shelter – soil is a possibility, but not necessary – and moisture, he said.

Once established, they are blamed for disrupting local ecology by displacing native ants and other species, interfering with agriculture and stinging people who happen to step on their large mounds.

"These colonies have often half a million workers — you don't get stung just once," Ross said…”

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"The U.S. Air Force’s most mysterious spacecraft is headed back into orbit after a four-month hiatus. The second copy of the Boeing-built X-37 robotic space plane is slated for launch, atop an Atlas V rocket, from Cape Canaveral in Florida sometime on Friday. Forecasts of bad weather could push the launch to Saturday.

In any event, the blast-off is sure to revive speculation regarding the curious, 29-foot-long spacecraft that lands like an airplane — just like a miniature, unmanned space shuttle.

Nearly a year after the first X-37B launched on its 225-day, orbit-hopping inaugural mission, nobody outside of the Air Force knows exactly what the X-37 is for. That ambiguity has even sparked a minor space race as Russia and China at least threaten to build similar vehicles.

In the wake of the first X-37’s April launch, analysts listed all the things the X-37 is theoretically capable of. It could be a commando transport, a bomber or an orbital spy. It could launch, repair or reposition U.S. satellites in low orbit. It could sneak up and disable or steal enemy satellites. Its pickup-bed-sized payload bay is particularly enticing to observers.

“You can put sensors in there, satellites in there,” said Eric Sterner, from The Marshall Institute. “You could stick munitions in there, provided they exist.”

“I applaud the ingenuity and innovation of some reports,” Richard McKinney, the deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space programs, joked during a December press conference. He insisted the 5-ton spacebot merely represents a “capability for a reusable and more effective way to test technology in space and return it for examination.”

“This is a test vehicle … pure and simple,” McKinney said.

But McKinney wouldn’t say what technologies the X-37 might be testing, and why the Air Force seems so attached to the idea of a self-landing, airplane-style space vehicle. After all, with the extra mass of its wings and landing gear, in some ways the X-37 is actually at a disadvantage compared to disposable spacecraft..."

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-- "The Yacare Caiman, a member of the crocodile family, was photographed pouncing on the piranha in the Ibera Wetlands of Argentina.

The freshwater reptiles, whose diet also includes birds and small mammals, can grow up to 10 feet long.

These amazing snaps were taken by German amateur photographer Gunter Heinz.

The 46 year old electrician said: "I wanted to get an action picture of the caiman.

"I took position in the water as the caiman went hunting.

"We tried an underwater shoot, wich was not very successful because the water is not really clear there.

"Eventually though, it pounced and I got the action shot I wanted.

"It was all over in an instant, but I've been photographing since I was 16 and it's very satisfying to get shots like these."

The Iberá Wetlands are a mix of swamps, bogs, stagnant lakes, lagoons and courses of water in the the province of Corrientes, Argentina.

A 245 square kilometre area was designated Wetland of International Importance in 2002."

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